Dona's Book Blog

Thank you to the author Ghessan Zeinnedine, publishers Tin House, and thank you as always to NetGalley, for an advance digital copy. All views are mine. By the time I finished reading this collection, I felt as if I'd made a dozen new friends. The character work here is so rich, and the storytelling surprising and rewarding. I'm quite looking forward to my second read of this collection! 1. "The Actors of Dearborn" - Two Lebonese men, one the child of immigrants and the other living in the US on an expired work visa, use acting to help them deal with their daily pressures. 2. "Speedoman" - A stranger in strange attire arrives at the community pool and grabs everyone's attention-- and their wallets! Top 3! 3. "Money Chickens" - A small business owner finds a curious place to hide his illicit earnings. 4. "Marsaille" - coming soon! 5. "I Have Reason to Believe My Neighbor is a Terrorist" - One woman goes to extreme...

Thank you to the author Kim Coleman Foote, publishers SJP Lit, and NetGalley for an digital copy. All views are mine. Opening quote: People will go after you for combining poverty and abuse. . . . [P] eople will say there’s poverty without abuse, and you will never say anything. . . . This is a story about love, you know that. . . . Because we all love imperfectly. —Elizabeth Strout, My Name Is Lucy Barton  loc.44 Three (or more) things I loved: 1. This writing is so gorgeous, holy sh-t. The intense beat keeps the book moving even though I haven't read anything this heavy since ROOTS. I can't even pick a passage, at least not yet, because the whole thing is so moving... 2.Foote's descriptions of human state are wonderfully and terribly detailed. For example, accute addiction: You ain’t gotten off the parlor sofa in days, and you know you need to. The state’ll take away your children and the landlord’ll run you out the house if you don’t get back...

Thank you to the author Brando Skyhorse, Avid Reader Press and Simon and Schuster, and as always NetGalley, for an advance digital copy of MY NAME IS IRIS. Thank you also to TLC Book Tours for having me on this tour and arranging for my physical and digital copies. All opinions are mine. This is the story of Iris Prince. She attempts to pull her family, who immigrated to the US or who are second generation USians, together through their own struggles while resisting racism in their city to varying degrees of intensity, everywhere they go. These repeated experiences of exclusion seem to collect in force and lead up to the ending, which is equal in intensity and opposite in tone and internal logic to this long journey. The ending embraces a surreal form and logic, as if to weird the form of magical realism counter to the very idea and existence of racism. But before this surreal conclusion, the story unravels its internal logic, as though challenging the very fabric of the ra...

Thank you to the author Ann Beatty,  publishers Scribner, and as always NetGalley, for an advance audio copy of ONLOOKERS. I find sets of stories are hard to review as collections and do better when reviewed at the story level. In this case, it is easy to review the stories altogether since a common theme unites them. More like a common setting, pregnant with the obviousness of a theme. The setting is a small New England town of mixed political makeup, during an event of political unrest (theme) that mirrors some we might recognize from our own news. Most of these stories aren't political, or rather their plots aren't, their characters aren't any more than they need to be to serve the stories. But the world around them is very, very political and it bears geratly on the characters and plots of each story. Mini reviews of the contained stories: 1. "Pegasus" Named for the city hospital's life flight helicopter, this long short story attempts to c...